Protected
by nonsequiturvy
Summary: In which Robin and Regina come to an agreement on the matter of her safety, and Robin uses Roland as code for something else. Enchanted Forest, missing year.


**A/N:** Based on the Tumblr dialogue prompt, "But, I can work with that." Pop in a review if you can at the end! I'd appreciate it greatly :) always love to hear your thoughts on things!

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He tries to be nonchalant about it, but it doesn't escape her attention that whenever danger is near, he is never far behind.

This latest attack on the castle shield is no exception.

And as Regina is the only one with the power to hold her own outside its protection, naturally, only she should be allowed to cross it. Which was something she had made perfectly clear to the motley crew attempting to follow suit—Snow with her clumsy broadsword, Charming with his useless hero hair—and in terms that all but threatened bodily harm should they argue otherwise. Not to mention the fact that the witch was out specifically to get _her_. That this was her fight, and it was a fight she would handle alone.

So, naturally, Robin had completely ignored everything she said, had chosen to match every two of her steps with one of his own anyway. Had nearly gotten himself killed in the process of doing something stupid and reckless and noble, something she imagined to be his idea of protecting her, as if she needed anyone's protection, least of all his.

"How _dare _you!" Regina sputters out as soon as she's gotten her breath and her anger back, both of which had left her momentarily at the sight of a winged beast as it hurtled through the air, with claws outstretched and aiming straight for Robin. She's sure they won't see eye to on eye on which came first—the monkey's head catching flame, or the arrow piercing its heart—but it's a fight that will have to wait until later, once they're through having this one.

Robin seems similarly winded, but somehow twice as enraged. "How dare _I_?" he asks, livid incredulity lifting his eyebrow sky-high as he regards her like she's just about lost her mind. "What the _bloody _hell do you think you were doing, going off on your own like that?"

She can't help it; she stares. Her words abandoning her for a rare moment, she stares and she tries to remember if he had ever raised his voice at her like that before.

Her memories come up blank.

She's been decidedly uncivil with him a fair number of times before, and all for reasons he'd entirely deserved—honestly, who thinks it would _ever _be a good idea to turn her courtyard into an archery competition? There's a pregnant princess wandering the grounds, for Christ's sake—but even when he sasses right back, it's always with a smirk on his face.

He doesn't look like he'll be smiling at her again anytime soon.

And it throws her, how upset she is that he has the gall to be upset with her first, so a disdainful "Excuse me?" is the best she can do in reply.

"I know you think yourself a fearless woman, Regina," he glowers, then grimaces when standing does not go as smoothly as he'd hoped, with his banged-up knees clutched in bruised and battered palms, "but I never thought you could be this outright senseless as well!"

She stiffens indignantly. Well that's quite enough. It's not her fault he'd gotten in her way (again), despite all his countless reassurances that he'd never dream of doing so. It's not her fault she's nursing a wounded arm, or that her favorite riding blouse is currently in bloody shambles, because if this idiot hadn't thrown his entire weight into her shoulder, then the rest of her wouldn't have slammed against this tree she's leaning on now, and the creature he clearly thought she couldn't manage on her own wouldn't have tried to shred him to bits instead.

Her mouth drops open to give him a piece of her mind, but he beats her to it.

Again.

"Look, Regina," Robin states, aiming for a calmer tone and failing miserably at it, "you can't just—"

Her hackles rise. "How dare you tell me what I can and cannot do!" she thunders finally, but he only talks louder, more forcefully, as though he's nearly given up on all pretense of formality with her.

"You can't waltz into the midst of danger like that and expect other people to just—let you!"

_Watch me_. "Please," Regina sneers contemptuously. "Like you weren't marching out here for fame and glory and bragging rights."

His voice genuinely softens now. "You know that's not what this is."

Does she? Perhaps, but just because she knows what it's not doesn't mean she's ready to know what it is. "I can handle myself, _thief_," she snarls, but as ever, the man is utterly unfazed by however she chooses to insult him, and the venom in her voice when she does (she'll have to bite harder next time, she thinks, every time). "Besides, Snow didn't seem to think I was incapable of—"

"And I will be having words with her on that matter soon enough, I can assure you."

The very thought of him engaged in heated discussion with Snow over the matter of something as unwarranted as Regina's safety is so absurd to her that she can't even grace it with a response.

"I know why you are doing this, Regina."

God, will he ever stop talking? As if the incessant badgering weren't bad enough, he can't seem to stop looking at her either, with those blue eyes of his. Those stupid blue eyes that haven't given her a moment's peace since they first locked on her the day he saved her from that flying monkey, a habit he's apparently finding rather hard to break.

She tries to sound lofty and uncaring, but he has this way of never buying it (not that thieves ever do), not when it comes to her. "And what, exactly, is _this_?"

"Throwing yourself in harm's way. Without a plan, or backup."

"I've always worked alone." Which is true enough, but the words are empty, so empty he doesn't seem to have heard them.

"It's almost as though you haven't thought ahead to what will happen if you lose."

Regina manages a half-smirk, dragging up the corner of her lips in a welcome shadow of her former self. "Perhaps that's because I never lose." And if she were talking to any other man, that would've been that, but this one will never let her off so easy.

"Now, see, I think it's more than that." Giving up on the task of standing for the moment, Robin leans his back to the tree, a quarter-turn to her left, then slides down to sit, one arm thrown over a knee, the other falling to rest inches away from her hand. Her fingers twitch briefly, then still. "I think it's because you no longer care if you do or not." She feels his gaze like a gentle caress, but she won't give him the satisfaction of looking back. She can't. There are traitorous tears prickling hot in her eyes that she would rather die than let him see. "You strike me as a woman who would never _not _have a plan, Regina."

The pressure of his stare intensifies the longer she stays silent.

He's been trying, valiantly, to keep the anger at bay, but still his voice drops to a low, aggravated hum. "Are you really so desperate to believe that simply because you place no value on your own life, nobody else could _possibly _do otherwise?"

"You see, that's what you don't understand," Regina tells him, articulating the words as though to a slow person. "There is no one else." Then, under her breath, "No one else that matters, anyway."

But Robin will not be deterred. "Are you saying that the green fairy doesn't matter? Snow White? Her husband, even, whom I've seen rush to your defense on the battlefield on more than one occasion? That not a single one of them cares for you?"

"Well why should they?" she demands, and if there's a sudden raspy quality in her tone she chooses to ignore it. "I'm nothing more than the Evil Queen. Your hairy round henchman made himself quite clear on that."

"Little John thinks what he does because he has spent the better part of his life running from you. He's never known anything else."

"Then what are _you _still doing here?" She stares up at the treetops, filtering the setting sunlight into a palette of dusky orange-reds that paint the forest floor. At a pair of scuffling squirrels on a branch overhead, battling it out over a walnut. Anywhere but him, as her resolve to stay strong and impervious to his inexplicable regard for her wavers more and more. "What's your excuse?"

Robin's voice is carefully casual when he finally answers. "He doesn't see what I see."

He pauses then, a respectful silence for her to break and ask just what, exactly, he thinks he's seeing when he looks at her as he does—always with a smirk to match her scowl, that insufferable twinkle in his eyes for every exasperated roll of her own—but they both know she never will.

In fact, it's disarming, how well he seems to know her, for someone she's been so determined to keep from following her every damn time she runs the other direction.

When he speaks again, the crossness has completely given way to something light and earnest, and the knowledge of such tenderness solely intended for her is painfully exquisite. "Simply because you are lost to your son does not mean he is lost to you, Regina. You know this is not what Henry would want."

If she couldn't bear to look at him before, now there aren't enough trees in the forest to block the path leading his eyes to hers. "And what would you know of that?" Her soul cracks as her voice does.

"Well," and Robin shifts on the ground, seeking out a more comfortable position for a conversation that suddenly feels quite the opposite. "Speaking as someone who also…cares, very deeply, about…" He stops as though in search of just the right words, and Regina finds her body betraying her, holding the air in her lungs captive while a nameless fear prickles up and down her spine, "…a son of my own…" and she releases her breath slowly, with measured calm, like turning the cap on a tire valve and letting the build-up of pressure compel the air out. "…I would hazard a guess to say that even though the memories of you are gone, the love between a parent and her child is no less real or meaningful because of it."

There is a lump in Regina's throat that feels suspiciously like her heart, a furious pounding in her neck that leaves her breathless all over again.

Robin's hand moves then, just the slightest disruption in her periphery, and she thinks for an exhilarating split of a second that he's about to twine her fingers in his, but then he reaches for his side to massage a sore spot instead. "If Henry is anything like the son I would imagine you to have raised, then I highly doubt he would allow you to think for a second that losing him is a worthy reason to lose yourself as well."

"Coming from you?" she taunts him without any real bite. "When you're the one leaving your son behind, chasing after a queen you've just spent a lifetime running from."

"You and I both know Roland will be safe with Snow White. And my boy would never fault me for wanting to protect you." Robin says it so matter-of-factly that she almost forgets how ludicrous it is, the very idea of it, the prince of thieves coming to the rescue of his queen, whose laws were his to break.

"Like I said," Regina rolls her eyes, even though he can't see it, "I don't need your protection."

"No?" he questions mildly. "Not even from yourself?"

Men have lost their heads for so much as looking at her the wrong way, let alone this. Whatever he's doing, whatever this is. Accusing her of things, of walking into danger without any intention of coming back out.

And…caring.

"You are your own worst enemy, Regina. Not I, not these fallen creatures—" and he gestures to their defeated foes, lifeless hairy bodies littering the forest floor ahead of them, "—and certainly not that witch who controls them and claims to be your sister."

She barks out a laugh. "Oh, I don't doubt that she is. She's inherited one of my family's more…let's just say charming qualities."

Robin's brow furrows. "Using magic to fight, you mean?"

"Not to fight," she corrects shortly. "To destroy."

"That is _not _your fate, Regina," he tells her vehemently, turning toward her with such abruptness it startles her into meeting his heated gaze. "Not if you don't let it." She feels a new pressure against her palm then, soft but insistent—his thumb, encircling her wrist, her hand encased in a rough, warm embrace by his much larger one.

"She means to throw you off." Though he's doing a much better job of it than the wicked witch ever could, Regina thinks fuzzily when his eyes turn positively molten. "You can't give in!" His grip tightens. "Don't lose sight of your real family, Regina. Your real family cares, whether you would like for them to or not."

She makes a scoffing sound, but the lump in her throat has grown, and she can't seem to express her disbelief in words.

"And besides," Robin continues, dropping his gaze and his voice, into something deep and gravelly, a pleasant scratch, soothing an itch Regina didn't realize she had, "I'm sure you have not failed to notice that…I…"

Her hand gives an involuntary jerk, a small but noticeable slip from his grasp, and he diverts course so smoothly she would hardly have noticed, had she not chosen to get caught in his stare at that exact moment, and see his eyes say what he will not, at least not now, "…my boy…is quite taken with you."

Her head feels light and volatile. "Well, he's lovely," Regina sniffs, and she doesn't sound breathless at all, no, not one bit. Her shoulders square and straighten to pull the air back in, regain some of the composure he's so very unceremoniously stolen from her with his near-confession. "He must get it from his mother."

Robin laughs outright then, as lovely as it is unexpected. "You're probably right about that." His chuckle rumbles and reverberates, and she thinks maybe she's out of the woods at last, that this discussion can finally come to a much-needed end, but then his tone takes a turn for the serious again. "I want you to promise me something."

"Fine," she hears herself saying, anything that will get him to stop making her _feel_ things, things other than the blooming ache in her shoulder that she still hasn't found the energy to tend to—things that have her pulse racing against time for all the wrong reasons.

"I want you…" Robin reaches his other hand around to capture hers back, "to promise me that the next time you barge out in search of a fight, we will at least walk side-by-side into the foray. That even if you don't need protection, you will humor me all the same." His grin draws up at one end, a scandalous, lopsided trick on her heart. Her thoughts are a mess of curses and thrills, furious that his stubborn persistence might just get him his way, yet oddly comforted by it, too.

She pictures Henry's reaction, were he to learn that the famed Robin Hood had taken it upon himself to keep her safe.

His giddy grin haunts her as much as ever, but the pain is somehow more bearable now, perhaps something she can even learn to live with, instead of seeking to end it along with everything else.

Robin does not take her silence for a no, even decides to push his luck further. "And that you will let me have a look at that shoulder."

"That I _can_ handle on my own," she tells him with a quelling eyebrow raise, as she rolls out sore kinks in the offending joint, tries not to wince too visibly in case he takes it as an invitation to examine her wounds closer anyway. "Unless you're telling me you need someone to look at those knees?" She levels him with a pointed look.

"No, I don't think that will be necessary," says Robin, perfectly, suspiciously amiable. "Are we in agreement on the other matter, then?"

Regina stands gingerly to her feet, and he follows.

He always does.

"For Roland, you mean?" she questions innocently, brushing stray bits of leaf and twig from leather and velvet. The motions tug unpleasantly at the open tears in her skin, but she pays them no mind. She's had far worse, and nobody who had her back then when she did.

"Of course," Robin concurs, "for…Roland." A pause. "And for Henry, above all else."

For Henry.

"I suppose I can work with that," Regina allows at last, and his answering smile, as he steadies her at the elbow with a gentle hand that she doesn't shrug off right away, is the light in her darkness as they make their way back to the castle, and hers back to Henry, someday.


End file.
